The 1960 United States presidential election in Pennsylvania took place on November 8, 1960. Voters chose 32 representatives, or electors to the
Electoral College, who voted for
president and
vice president.

Contents

Background

Pennsylvania had historically been a powerfully Republican state that owing to industrialization had become Democratic-leaning following the
New Deal:[1] 1960 saw Democrats surpass Republicans in registration for the first time since the Civil War.[2] However, the nomination of the second Catholic presidential candidate in John F. Kennedy complicated this issue because most of rural Pennsylvania was powerfully
Appalachian and extremely hostile to voting for a Catholic,[3] creating the potential for large anti-Democratic swings and trends in the northeastern non-Yankee
Pocono Mountains. The non-Appalachian
Pennsylvania Dutch Country had been similarly hostile to Catholicism throughout the state’s history,[4] and owing to opposition to Irish control of the Democratic Party most of the state’s urban Catholics would before the New Deal back dominant Republican machines in which they had no actual political power.[5]

However, in 1958 Pennsylvania – a state historically very reluctant to elect Catholics to major offices – had elected
David L. Lawrence as
Governor. Nevertheless, his margin was much smaller than polls had previously predicted, with decreases vis-à-vis the 1954 gubernatorial election even in heavily Catholic urban counties.[6]Massachusetts Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy had emerged as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination but Pennsylvania Democrats were reluctant to run his for fear of an anti-Catholic reaction in traditionally Democratic rural counties. However, lobbying by
Boston ArchbishopRichard Cushing meant Governor Lawrence released sixty-four of the state’s eighty-one delegates for Kennedy[7] in a bid to stop
Adlai Stevenson II from gaining a third nomination.[8]

Vote

Pennsylvania narrowly voted for the
Democratic nominee Senator Kennedy over the
Republican nominee,
Vice PresidentRichard Nixon. Kennedy won Pennsylvania by a slim margin of 2.32 percentage points, being aided rather than hindered by his Catholic faith owing to the numerical power of his co-religionists in urban Philadelphia,
Lackawanna County, and in the industrial areas around
Lake Erie.[6] This clearly outnumbered anti-Catholic sentiment in rural areas, which caused him to lose ground vis-à-vis Adlai Stevenson in sixteen rural counties.[6]